Wrong Turn
by wynnebat
Summary: It all started when Harry burned the Elder wand. Time travel, dimension travel, SLASH.


Beware the **slash**.

I've never been to Stanford, King's Cross Station or any of the places mentioned in this story. My entire knowledge of these places involves Google and major fudging of details and locations. Bear with me.

This is a work of fanfiction that I don't own and don't make money off of.

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It all started when Harry decided to burn the Elder Wand.

In his defense, he hadn't known what would happen.

But that defense never worked, not after the fact. Not after it changed his entire life, made it better and worse in equal measure.

He'd been nineteen and in the midst of Auror training and the latest Dark Lord's movement. Patrick Willowby, age forty-five, half-blood, displaced by Umbridge during Voldemort's reign and family killed by Voldemort's supporters. Harry had all but memorized his file during the Auror office's siege on Hogwarts. Willowby had taken the school hostage in order to prove his point: they weren't strong enough without muggles and must join with them for the good of all humankind.

Harry had spent two weeks running on a few hours of sleep, too many cups of coffee, and a consuming worry over Willowby discovering the Elder Wand. Too many people had heard Harry's speech in the Great Hall, realized the reality of the Deathly Hallows.

And what if, by leaving the wand in Dumbledore's tomb, Harry had resigned as its master? What if Harry was still the master, but the wand would take Willowby as another master, one who would actually use it?

All he knew was that the wand couldn't be allowed to fall into the hands of another Dark Lord. Willowby was bad, but he would be nearly unstoppable with the Elder wand.

When the Aurors finally overturned Hogwarts' wards and secured the students and Willowby, Harry headed straight toward Dumbledore's marble tomb. He spent a moment in prayer, asking the Dumbledore above what he should do, but received no answer. The only thing he could think of was to destroy the Elder Wand so that it would never get in the wrong hands again.

He burned it right there in the tomb, watched it fall apart under his spell. When the smoke finally cleared, Harry collected the wand's ashes and scattered them across the Black Lake. The wand, as he understood it, was no more.

He didn't think much of the moment at the time, not even when he'd realized that the deathly hallows were now no more. Willowby had destroyed Harry's cloak of invisibility a few weeks earlier, and Harry had thought it over and decided not to find the elder wand and fix the cloak to its former glory. Sometimes, it was just time to let things go. The time of the hallows was over, he'd felt. He'd found the stone once again and used its magic to rebuild Hogwarts to its pre-war glory. All three hallows were now gone forever. And if Harry sometimes regretted destroying the wand, on the off chance that he might actually need it one day, well, he never told anyone.

At the time, he'd thought the hallows were very easily destroyed, for legendary objects created by Death himself (were you to listen to Xeno Lovegood).

He'd never realized that to truly own the hallows, one first had have the power to leave them behind.

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The first time Harry died, suffering from the final stages of the twenty first century's dragon pox epidemic, it was quicker and easier than falling asleep. The last year of his life had been hard, and death had been both a peaceful rest and the next great adventure. He'd been young, unattached, at the peak of his life, and closed his eyes for the last time with every intention of meeting Dumbledore once again.

The meeting did not go quite as planned.

For that matter, no meeting with Professor Dumbledore had ever gone quite as planned for anyone, but usually in those cases the old professor had actually shown up.

Harry sat on the ground in his head's dreamy, white-washed Platform 9 and ¾, leaning against the stone wall he'd crossed time and time again at the beginning and end of his school years. It felt like hours that he waited, though he wouldn't know. In life, he'd always been too impatient to judge time properly. Too quick to rush into things, like apparating supplies to St. Mungo's despite knowing there was a chance of infection. Or the foolhardy plans of his Hogwarts years.

It was easy to sit back and reminisce at the train station, so easy to sit there peacefully, doing nothing at all.

But Harry had never been good at just sitting around.

"Professor Dumbledore? I'm ready to go," he called into the empty room. He wasn't surprised when no one answered.

But instead of sitting back once again and drifting off, Harry started walking down the side of the tracks. Not in the direction he would've gone to Hogwarts through, but the opposite one. He had been to Hogwarts many, many times. It was time to go the opposite way. When the platform ended, he jumped onto the train tracks and hoped he wouldn't meet a train.

It felt strange, walking along a place that had been so dangerous and forbidden in life, but completely safe in death. Wherever he was, in his head or in the afterlife, he thought it probably wouldn't have functioning trains. And if it did, well, it wasn't like he could die _again_, right?

Minutes, hours, days went by. In the entire time, Harry didn't hear a single sound except for his breathing, his footsteps, and his occasional humming.

He began to think that his journey was endless, that he would walk forever and never get anywhere, that perhaps he should have waited longer at King's Cross for Dumbledore. Perhaps Dumbledore had only been delayed by a game of cricket with Grindelwald running too long, or by the maker of lemon drops creating a new recipe. Whatever people did in heaven.

Or perhaps this was what death entailed: an eternity of rest, if only he let himself sleep. It didn't appeal to Harry very much. He spent the first half of his life (and whatever anyone might say, Harry considered his life to have begun at Hogwarts, the years with the Dursleys almost a bad dream) involuntary fighting against a madman, then the latter half voluntarily chasing down criminals, illegal items, and diseases. He didn't know how to rest, nor did he particularly want to learn.

Eventually, he came to another opening, another series of platforms. This room was also closed off overhead, Harry noticed with a sigh. He missed the open sky.

He climbed up onto the platform from the tracks and stared. For miles on end, all he could see were brick walls similar to the platform he'd left behind, but never ending.

Platform 1, the nearest one read. Underneath it was the symbol of the deathly hallows drawn by a steady hand.

Harry walked on, but by Platform 87 he still couldn't see the end of the room. He concluded that the place was never-ending.

_This place is unnerving_, Harry thought as he remembered a similar sea of white stone in the graveyard after the war. Unlike the real King's Cross station, everything in the room was in shades of white. Harry's own tanned skin seemed bizarre against its backdrop.

Wondering if what he was seeing was really real, Harry touched the nearest platform. The stone hummed underneath his fingers with a vibration unlike anything he'd ever felt. Pressing harder, Harry noticed color spreading from the points of his fingers outwards across the wall. A wave of tan, red, blue, black. The colors swirled and the vibration stuttered before everything quickly changed and the colors formed into a picture Harry could've seen on any TV.

Harry jerked his hand back, stunned, but the picture didn't disappear.

It was a happy suburban visage, with cheerful children playing merrily in a playground and groups of parents chatting nearby. Harry counted six children and four parents or relatives, all mingling and talking on a summer day. There wasn't a cloud in the sky or a blip in the scene. Slowly, Harry touched the picture again, this time noticing his fingers were pressing into the picture itself. He could see his arm there on the other side of the wall. He pressed harder, watching his arm sinking into the scene.

It was as though he was becoming part of the picture.

_Was this what heaven was like? _Harry wondered. It certainly didn't feel like it. His parents, when they'd appeared to him using the stone, hadn't said anything about the sheer confusion that was the afterlife. But they hadn't stayed with him for long.

It was a good thing the resurrection stone was forever lost to him. Harry didn't know if he could've resisted using it once again, just to see his parents. Especially now that he was beginning to suspect he might not find his parents in this afterlife. His parents probably had a happier afterlife than his. One full of laughter and pranks and his mother herding the marauders into line.

The picture of his arm wavered slightly as he thought of his mother, distorting until it looked more like Ginny's arm than his own. Harry panicked, thinking of his own arm as well as he could remember it, keeping his appearance in mind. It turned back. Then, within seconds, he was standing beside the playground in a spot of shade, watching the children in person instead of through a wall. He dropped down onto a bench out of shock.

This was nothing like he'd thought the afterlife would be. It felt too real. He could smell pollen and cut grass, feel wood against his jeans, hear birds singing in the trees. He put his head in his hands and thought.

"Are you alright?"

Harry looked up to see a woman around his age, or a few years older, staring down at him. She had lovely brown hair, tied up in a bun, and wore a simple pair of jeans and shirt. She wasn't tall, but from his position on the low bench, she towered over him. Harry suddenly felt like the man parents warn their children away from, the kind that visits playgrounds without bringing a child. Then he had to wonder if the woman was a figment of his imagination, or another dead soul.

"I'm a bit lost," Harry admitted after a moment too long.

"A bit," she said with a smile. "You're from England then?"

Now that he thought about it, her accent was different from his. "Yes. Er, where is this?"

"Hervey Bay," she replied.

Harry stared blankly at her.

"Queensland? Australia? Y'know, the land down under?"

"Right," Harry replied. "Of course." _Australia. _

He left soon, choosing to walk the streets of the seaside city he'd landed at. The next day brought him to the playground again, and to Amy and her daughter Angie. It turned out they were American born, and had moved to the land of the kangaroos (as Angie called it) with Amy's former husband. Amy didn't elaborate and Harry didn't ask, and neither of them talked about Harry's past. But when Harry, unsure of what to do with himself after evening fell, wished them goodbye, Amy told him her friend Doug would give him room and board for a while, if he needed it. Just until he got on his feet again.

It reminded Harry of the Weasleys' never-ending generosity, of the charity of the English wizarding community during the dragon pox epidemic. He'd never have to deal with dragon pox again – the ability to feel his skin and the newness of not being in pain all the time still hadn't set in – but he'd also never see Molly, Arthur, Ron, and Ginny every again. Harry couldn't imagine living without his family and friends, especially since he hadn't met his parents in the afterlife.

Still lost and confused, he followed Amy and Angie, and met with Doug, and never really left.

He lived there with Doug, then later with Amy and Angie, for the next few years, working odd jobs and watching Angie grow up with a wistful wonder of how his and Ginny's kids could have turned out. And he was happier than he'd ever been, without the stress of his life as the Boy-Who-Lived and the Man-Who-Conquered, and more melancholy than ever, because of everything he had lost. He'd lived there right up until he was at the wrong place at the wrong time during an armed robbery at a bank. Without magic, Harry was powerless to stop them, and this time, dying was messy and terrible and something he'd never wish on another person again.

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He returned to death's train station, thrown across from Platform 87. He almost punched himself in his haste to feel the bullet wound, but his hand found only the smooth feel of his Hogwarts robes and an encouraging lack of blood soaking through his clothes. It occurred to him that there was no reason for him to be wearing his school robes, but that didn't matter quite right then.

Terrified for his girls' safety, Harry quickly pushed his way through Platform 87's white brick wall, but when he returned to that world, little Angie was twenty-seven years old to Harry's nineteen. She was so beautiful and successful that his heart ached for all the years he missed, and Amy was happy with another man. He didn't bother meeting them again. They had probably forgotten him by now.

The time he tried, he arrived a century in the past, in a small, scenic Irish town.

It seemed was no rhyme or reason to when he would arrive, only that he never went where he wanted to go.

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Later, he died in a bar fight, then of alcohol poisoning, then in a tsunami, all in different worlds. He met talking dragons and aliens and gods. He landed in a town so strange that Harry had become unsure if he'd go back to the same place when he died and a city so boring that the Dursleys would have fallen in love with it. He learned to use chopsticks correctly and speak Martian-nu and gained a healthy dislike of Desert Bluffs.

Each time, he stayed longer in the train station beyond death, because as beautiful as life was, he'd finally learned how fragile humans were. He died so, so easily – and the people around him even easier. He talked to many people about death, but never found someone who knew where regular people went. And never did he go to another place when he died; he always arrived in the same a hall with enough doors that he could spend eternity viewing them all.

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After a while, Harry realized that he only had to expect a numbered door, and it would be the next one he saw. He realized that if he thought about it, he didn't need numbers on the doors.

It was as though he'd developed a sixth sense in his time beyond the veil. He could recognize each world's subtle vibration, could tell his home world apart from the billions of dimensions across the veil. Each world had a subtle difference – and different vibration to his senses. He couldn't hear, see, or smell, but the senses he'd developed after death helped him recognize these new worlds. If he knew which world he wanted to go to, with one exception, he'd get there. Harry's home world, the only world blocked to him, where Ginny still lived with her newest husband, had the best pitch of all. The subtlest, sweetest vibrancy.

(And when he stopped needing the numbers, they vanished. That didn't help – Harry sometimes scared himself thinking of the power he had over the afterlife. And even worse than that was the feeling that he'd never be able to just stop living, even after he turned centuries, millennia, old.)

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By his fifth world, he learned two important things: he could appear in a world looking like whoever he wanted, and he could take one power into the world with him, but only if the power already existed in that world.

And they _were_ different worlds, Harry realized. Whether he called them worlds, or universes, or realities – it didn't matter. Some were more advanced than his own, some crazier, some better adjusted, but they were all strange and beautiful to see.

Most of the time, he kept his old face and the ability to heal; the first because he hated feeling like an imposter, the second because out of everything, he'd found it to be the most useful power he could have.

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He only tried to go back to his own King's Cross station once. When he spend double the time traveling back than he had traveling to the new station, he stopped and turned back. Within seconds he was there again. He got the picture.

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After a while, he gave up trying to hide himself away. He was what he was, and if he was seen materializing into a world, then some random muggle would assume they'd been hallucinating or something. When he knew his presence in any given world was transient, secrets became too much effort to keep. He stayed careful, though, and in his defense, the dim parking lot he materialized during his 9th life had seemed empty of people.

He came into being in the middle of an empty parking lot, outside a sign advertising Route 76 Motel, a place that apparently had "all the comforts of home." It wasn't the place he'd left, nor home, but it would have to do. He'd left his last life all too soon (he'd left all of them too soon, he thought sadly, even the ones where he'd lived over a decade).

For a moment, he just stood there, soaking up the pleasure of being able to feel again. There was nothing in between words, no sensation, no sound, no touch. Nothing except his thoughts, and he'd had enough of those. He'd missed this.

Within moments he decided to skip the shady motel and find a more comfortable bed and breakfast in the area. Now that he could feel again, he had no interest in scratchy sheets and the all too high possibility of bed bugs. He blamed his distraction on all this, because when he turned around, it was to the distinct sound of a gun clicking two feet away from his head.

The man with the gun didn't move it away from pointing at Harry's head as Harry turned around, instead grabbing a book from his pocket. It looked like a bible or a journal, leather-bound and old. The man himself seemed young, in his mid-thirties, and much too put together to need Harry's wallet. Judging by his grave expression, Harry didn't think he had anything against shooting the gun, either.

"My wallet's in my pocket, okay?" Harry said, because even though he wasn't afraid of death, he didn't necessarily like dying. It was an unpleasant experience all around. Not to mention, with the angry look that appeared on the man's face when Harry started talking, he didn't want to take any chances. The man could have his carefully imagined documentation and meager amount of cash.

"I don't care about your wallet. What I care about are the three children you've murdered, hellspawn," the man replied, his voice brimming with anger.

Well. That wasn't something Harry heard every day. Usually people went with demon or witch. "I'm not a— whatever that is." And he wasn't lying; hopefully then man would be able to tell. "Look, my name is Harry Potter. I'm a college student. I haven't murdered anyone."

The man's expression didn't change.

"Then how'd you get here, college student? Because I've been scoping out the area for two hours, and your appearing act seems witchy enough to me."

"Maybe you weren't watching carefully enough? Besides, why do you care? You don't look like law enforcement." Harry asked, knowing exactly how guilty he sounded.

"I'm a hunter. And you're one stupid hellspawn, if you think I'm going to fall for that act. Now, I'm not quite sure how to kill you, but—" he flipped open his book and began reading something in a language Harry didn't know.

Neither did he care to know, really. He turned to run far away from the crazy person who thought he was some sort of monster, hoping to run away while the man was focused on his chant.

Harry only got a few steps away when he felt the bullet enter his back. He fell to the ground, clawed at the gravel under his hands. He wanted to curse at the man – or tell him he wasn't a hellhound once again, maybe get it through the man's thick skull – but he didn't think he could speak. All he felt was pain rippling through his body, with the man's rough voice chanting in the distance.

The second shot was barely even necessary to kill him, and within seconds Harry was at King's Cross once again.

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The pairing is very likely going to be Sam/Harry with a small possibility of Dean/Harry or Sam/Dean/Harry. It all depends on how the plot goes. Also, just warning you, I'm a college student. I have barely any free time, which means next update could be in a week or a month or a year.


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